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Comment by Phenix88be | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else think this is fake ? I mean, 11 years old can have that level of thinking ? Or maybe I m missing something ?

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For many years now, I have used vacation time to work at an academic summer camp for 11 and 12 year olds. Almost all of the kids have phones, but some years there's one (I don't think there's ever been more than one) who does not.

A couple of the children without phones have been very proud of the fact they don't have phones. They'll readily tell you they don't need one and don't want one.

Now, I have no clue if these children were in truth allowed phones by their parents, or how they would react if actually offered one. But they certainly seemed to be doing fine.

So, yes, I found the story plenty believable.

P.S. If it sounds like a crappy situation where only one kid is left without a phone, I don't disagree, but it's mostly out of my control. As I said, some children are completely fine with it, but I had one this past summer who was not.

It’s probably the new version of how you can tell that someone doesn’t watch tv. You don’t, they’ll tell you.

They absolutely have that level of thinking. They can't always verbalize it eloquently, so the author may have re-phrased it as the article was written. But my kids have real depth of feeling about the world, their place within it, and have more passion about engaging with it in their own way than most adults I know... not because adults don't have the same concerns, but because we resolved them decades ago, while the teens and tweens are just starting to engage in that process.

11 year olds can be brilliant, and tragically I suspect far more of them would if we didn't infantilize them.

Some level of infantilising is not necessarily a bad thing. I definitely was not equipped mentally to be able to overcome the things I am dealing with in my 20s. Was I any less smart when I was 11? Probably not; but now I have other skills and traits apart from intelligence. Work ethics, sense of responsibility, and empathy to name a few.

Giving kids too much responsibility or credit does not help them further down their lives, but at the same time disregarding them entirely because they're kids will do irreparable damage to their self esteem.

"Was I any less smart when I was 11? Probably not;"

For reasonable definitions of "less smart", yes, you were. There's a lot of work on child development, and it does not support the idea that an 11-year-old is as fully equipped as an adult. Piaget's child development stages is an accessible overview if you want a nice Googleable term. Modern academics would quibble with various aspects but from what I can see a lot of the general ideas one would get from a quick breeze-through are still a reasonable start.

I'm actually pretty close to first in line to say that we underestimate children... buuuut, at the same time, no, they are not just little adults that are getting suppressed by The Man or whatever. They really aren't anywhere near fully developed yet, and are as a population, generally incapable of many things no matter how hard you tried to push them. And even if you do find an individual 11-year-old that, say, is fine with calculus, in another 10 years they'll be even more developed.

I have a theory that children reach a high level of mental capability very quickly. What they lack is experience and an adult level of language facility. I think it's a very good idea to speak using easy to understand language when talking to children. However, I also think it's a good idea to expect that they have very good reasoning ability if given enough information.

Absolutely. Then puberty hits and the brilliance seems to take a huge dip. I guess obsessing about sex takes a lot of brainpower. Just a hypothesis though.

That hypothesis is sensible.

According to The Male Brain, by psychiatrist Louann Brizendine, males have 2.5x the space devoted to sexual drive in the hypothalamus compared to females.

By the time males reach puberty, guy’s sexual occupation and fertile female tracking circuits run in the background non-stop like an unkillable daemon process.

That’s absolutely going to divert brainpower.

Speaking personally, I feel that the experience of sexual attraction and sexual desire has been a stimulus to the development of my intelligence, not a brake upon it. If you look at great art and literature you will see it has played a crucial role there too. So no, I don't think it is a 'sensible hypothesis'.

Oh, absolutely. For a tiny percentage of creative and productive people. For the masses, however, I don't see it.

Eleven-year-olds are often very sensible. Stupidity sets in a couple of years after that age, according to my observations.

Since this is vogue.com, I would tend to think so.

Could be true though, kids can be renitent and are generally smarter than people think.

My teen nephew loves video games but really really doesn't want a cell phone, even though his parents want him to have one. He doesn't want to be bothered all the time. 11-year olds can be quite smart and independent. Don't you remember being 11 or 12? It's a little blurry to me as an adult but I remember the books I read and family vacations and I don't think I was an oblivious dolt :)

Children are probably smarter than you think.

I know it's probably satire, or outright bullshit, but I want to believe that there are kids this smart walking the Earth.

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